AFR signed onto a comment letter to the CFPB with 21 organizations recommending that they expand their excellent proposal to create a public database for credit card complaints to include actual complaint narratives, and suggestions to make it easier for researchers and the public to access the data as a pre-purchase tool to avoid problems and to help identify where troubling trends lie.
(Comments drafted by Consumer Action)
Click here to view this week’s highlights and lowlights in Wall Street Reform – January 21, 2012 – January 27, 2012.
“Asked to evaluate Cordray’s performance, John Carey, spokesman for the consumer coalition called Americans for Financial Reform, said: ‘There are reasons that Director Cordray received a wide range of support, across the political spectrum, from those that know and worked with him in Ohio. He is fair, tough and thoughtful, and those traits were on full display yesterday.’”
“Nearly two dozen professors and groups have joined the effort. Bank of America, the Fed and the Treasury declined to comment on the planned petition. …the letter was distributed on a list-serve for a coalition called Americans for Financial Reform…”
“‘It is specious to the point of misleading to suggest that the needs for liquidity currently provided by banks will not be filled,’ Wallace Turbeville, who represented Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit group that favors new restrictions on Wall Street risk-taking, told a Congressional committee this month.”
Read our letter to members of Congress urging them to reject HR 1840, 2779, 2586, 2682, and 3527, a series of derivatives bills in the House Agriculture Committee that would severely weaken regulation.
AFR sent a letter to SEC Chairman, Mary Schapiro indicating our objection to the SEC’s decision to delay implementation of Section IX of Dodd-Frank. This will result in the delay of corporate governance and executive compensation reforms necessary to the public interest.
“People in the US send more than $400 billion in remittances each year, hard earned dollars that are crucial for their families overseas. We applaud the CFPB for a rule that will provide clarity and confidence for consumers. This rule lets people compare prices and shop for the best service, and defend remittance senders’ rights if companies do not fulfill their obligations or if money is not delivered as promised.”
“Consumer groups and supporters of the rule have leaned on regulators to stick to the implementation timeline and pushed back against assertions that the rule will damage capital markets. The arguments from financial firms ‘are all founded on the irrational assumption that, once bank proprietary trading ceases under the Volcker Rule, others will not expand to meet demand,’ Wallace C. Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs banker, said in testimony prepared for the hearing on behalf of Americans for Financial Reform, an umbrella organization made up of consumer groups, labor unions and civil rights law firms.”
“However, a representative of the group Americans for Financial Reform argued the Volcker Rule is a vital safeguard for the financial system, ensuring that American taxpayers no longer effectively guarantee risky trading done by insured depository institutions.”